Thursday, April 26, 2012

A strange object flying close to the sun looks unnervingly like a huge, metallic 'mothership' familiar from Hollywood blockbusters. The picture was released by NASA's sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known as SOHO - and has become an immediate cult hit on the internet.

UFO fan site Gather News said: ‘An unusually shaped, gigantic UFO was spotted on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and posted in a video on YouTube. ‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star. What is it?' asked the site. UFO fans on YouTube have been highly enthusiastic about the object, with many claiming it as a definite 'spot'. SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a satellite built to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind. SOHO was launched on December 2, 1995. The twelve instruments on board SOHO communicate with large radio dishes around the world which form NASA's Deep Space Network are used for data downlink and commanding.

‘The video shows what looks like a metallic, jointed spaceship with a gigantic extension, perhaps a boom arm, anchored off its lower end. 'An enlargement of the object makes the enormously large UFO look like a ship straight out of a Hollywood movie.' I took a screenshot and added light to it and you can see another part of the ship. It has another third arm that goes down. So strange.﻿ Keep up the great work,' says one UFO fan. Others are more sceptical, claiming such artefacts are often the product of distortion hitting SOHO's sensors. ‘There is no way this object is merely vapour, as the shape of it is rigidly straight and grooved and appears to be manufactured in some way,' says the UFO fan site. 'Also, there seems to be some intelligent design involved. It's beyond human engineering to create.' - Daily Mail.

The springtime nor’easter will have broken records and deposited
inches of rain by the time Tuesday ushers in drier weather in its place.

The massive storm is still churning
over upstate New York and will linger awhile more, although the
heaviest rains have ceased. Clouds will stick around on Tuesday over New
York City, with cooler than normal temperatures prevailing. The intensity of the storm was nearly unprecedented so late in the
season. Drought-stricken Long Island got wet, New York Harbor saw
tropical storm force winds and more than a foot of snow landed in
western parts of the state. New York City broke a 43-year-old daily rainfall record after Central
Park tallied 2.45 inches of liquid precipitation (beating 1.8 inches on
the same date in 1969). By the time the drops stopped completely on
Monday, more than three inches had fallen across a vast swath of coastal
New Jersey, much of Long Island and southern Connecticut. West Haven,
Conn. picked up the biggest total, at just over four inches. (You can
explore a comprehensive summary of snow, wind and rain reports via this interactive weather service map.) The highly amplified weather pattern drew moisture northwards from as
far afield as Nicaragua and gathered much of its energy from the
anomalously warm Gulf of Mexico. As for the cause, a recent report
by an international panel of scientists concluded that these extreme
weather events are occurring more often due to climate change.From Snowtober to Snowpril: Though not quite as powerful and affecting a more limited area, the nor’easter drew comparisons
to a late October’s East Coast blizzard. That snowstorm, as you’ll
remember, caused more than a billion dollars of damage and blacked out
large chunks of Connecticut for more than a week. For many in the
region, this recent storm bookended a highly unusual winter in which the
two biggest storms fell outside of the typical November-to-March
window, with hardly any snow in between. At least 18 inches of snow has fallen as of Monday afternoon in the higher elevations east of Pittsburgh, a city that since the 1880s
has only recorded significant snows a handful of times after April 15.
In Ithaca, N.Y., and across western parts of the state, nearly a foot of
snow brought snowplows out in force and snapped countless branches with
trees in full leaf after a record warm month of March. Winter storm
warnings remain in effect through Tuesday morning in that region, and
more than 57,000 households will be spending the first of what could be
many nights without power. - Wall Street Journal.

Suspected tornadoes have struck two areas of England damaging buildings and uprooting trees. Residents in Rugby in Warwickshire said a tornado had "ripped a path" through their properties toppling a chimney stack and knocking down fences.

Meanwhile more than 100 miles away farm buildings were blown down killing 20 chickens near Halstead in Essex. Police said it was amazing no-one had been hurt and advised drivers and pedestrians to watch out for debris. Warwickshire Police said a number of homes had been damaged in the Wentworth Road area of Rugby. Essex Police said it had also received reports of wild weather on Wednesday afternoon. Rugby resident Jamie Gray said the tornado had "ripped a path" through properties in Glebe Crescent. The tornado is believed to have struck Rugby at about 18:00 BST. Another tornado is reported to have swept through the hamlet of Whiteash Green in Essex at about 16:30 BST. Farmer Alan Barrow said he was lifted off his feet and thrown to the ground. He said the tornado also blew apart his farm buildings and a chicken coop at Brook St Farm in Whiteash Green. Tony Blackwell said he also experienced the tornado in Essex which he estimated had lasted for about three minutes before moving off.

He said: "We had hailstones first of all and we came outside and we saw all the debris flailing and spinning around in a big circle in the sky. "Then we could see all the trees bending over and we realised it was a tornado. "We get strong winds here but I've never seen anything like a twister before." Roy Mushing, from Rugby, said he had gone out to to buy a lottery ticket when he was caught up in the high winds. He said: "All of sudden there was this big gush of wind. "It bent the brolly up and spun me round and a good job it did because it spun me towards the bungalows where all the tiles was flying off the roof and flying into the main road." He said he managed to make it safely back to his house in Wentworth Road. Beryl Clarke, who lives in the street, said: "At about 5.45 there was a roaring and we thought something was coming through the front window. "We rushed to the dining room and everything was flying up in the air, the greenhouse was going up, the glass was going everywhere. "The shed came over the fence from next door, it was like something out of a film. "Next door's got a trampoline outside their dining room and I don't know where it's come from. Everybody's got everyone else's stuff." - BBC.

Heavy rains drenching the Caribbean island of Hispaniola have caused mudslides and floods that killed up to nine people in Haiti and forced more than 11,000 people to flee their homes in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, The Telegraph reported.

Marie Alta Jean-Baptiste of Haiti's Civil Protection Office said nine people died in the southern and western parts of the country. The deaths included a 6-year-old child and a woman killed by landslides in the capital of Port-au-Prince and four who drowned in rivers outside the city, she said. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs gave a lower toll from three days of heavy storms at the start of the rainy season. It said in a statement that only six people had died since Monday.

High water and heavy rain are creating problems for the nearly 500,000 people still without homes in the aftermath of Haiti's 2010 earthquake. In the Dominican Republic, officials said there had not been any reports of deaths or injuries, but said about 11,150 people had been evacuated from their homes. Emergency office spokesman Jose Luis German said nearly 3,000 homes were flooded when rivers and streams spilt from their banks in the northern province of Puerto Plata and some central and southeastern towns. - TERT.

AVO
reported that elevated surface temperatures were observed over
Cleveland in satellite imagery during 17-18 April. An explosion on 19
April at 0438, detected by seismometers at Makushin and Okmok volcanoes,
generated an ash cloud the rose 4-6 km (13,100-19,700 ft) a.s.l.
and drifted S. Satellite images showed block-and-ash deposits extending
for up to 1 km down the S flank. A possible weak thermal anomaly was
detected in images during 20-21 April. Map

CVGHM
reported that during the morning on 24 April diffuse white plumes rose
25-50 m above Tompaluan crater, in the saddle between the Lokon-Empung
peaks. Later that day an eruption was accompanied by loud "thumping"
noises heard at local observation posts, though fog prevented views of
the crater. The next day diffuse white plumes rose 50-100 m above the
crater. The Alert Level remained at 3 (on a scale of 1-4). Map

POPOCATEPETL México 19.023°N, 98.622°W; summit elev. 5426 m

CENAPRED
reported that multiple gas-and-ash plumes rose from Popocatépetl on 18
April; one of the emissions was accompanied by increased incandescence
in the crater. An explosion ejected incandescent fragments that landed
on the N and NE flanks as far as 800 m from the crater. The fragments
landed on snow and generated small lahars. A dense gas, steam, and ash
plume drifted E and SE. On 19 April gas-and-ash plumes rose above the
crater and drifted ESE, and incandescent fragments rolled 1 km down the
flanks. The next day an episode of spasmodic tremor was accompanied by a
dense plume of gas, water vapor, and ash that rose 1.5 km and drifted
E. During 21-23 April gas-and-steam emissions that sometimes contained
small amounts of ash drifted SE, E, and SW. Seismicity was low during
21-22 April and again increased on 23 April. That same day an ash plume
drifted NE and incandescent fragments were ejected W. The Alert Level
remained at Yellow Phase Three. Map

For the complete list of ongoing volcanic activity and additional geological summary, click HERE or select the specific volcano name below for additional details:

The Ohio Division of Wildlife got a call on Sunday from a fisherman
who told the agency they should probably come see the flood of fish
carcasses in the Rocky River.

When they arrived, they discovered a waterway filled with dead aqua
life. The fish kill is still under investigation. Today, the ODW
announced the final death toll: 28,613 fish, along with other species. But the mere process of counting the dead was merely a first step.
The interesting part, in terms of going after whoever was responsible
for whatever caused the mass deaths (that's about as specific as we can
get right now), comes next.

“The investigators aren’t going back to the stream
today because they believe they have all the data that they need,” said
Jamey Graham, spokeswoman for the Wildlife Division’s District Three
(Northeast Ohio) office in Akron. “They are now sorting the fish
according to species and we should that information available soon.”

The reason for the separation of the fish by species is so that the
Wildlife Division can determine how much to charge in fines and
restitution if and when the culprit is identified. The state has
assigned a dollar figure for each fish species.

Swiss scientists have demonstrated how a partially paralyzed person can control a robot by thought alone, a step they hope will one day allow immobile people to interact with their surroundings through so-called avatars. Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants.

A scientist waves to Mark-Andre Duc, a partially tetraplegic patient, at
Switzerland's Federal Institute of
Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland,
Tuesday, April 24, 2012. From the hospital 100 kilometers (62 miles)
away, Duc, imagined lifting his fingers to direct a robot. Swiss
scientists demonstrated with this test how
a partially paralyzed person
can control a robot using brain signals alone.

On Tuesday, a team at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used only a simple head cap to record the brain signals of Mark-Andre Duc, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion 100 kilometers (62 miles) away. Duc's thoughts - or rather, the electrical signals emitted by his brain when he imagined lifting his paralyzed fingers - were decoded almost instantly by a laptop at the hospital. The resulting instructions - left or right - were then transmitted to a foot-tall robot scooting around the Lausanne lab. Duc lost control of his legs and fingers in a fall and is now considered partially quadriplegic. He said controlling the robot wasn't hard on a good day. "But when I'm in pain it becomes more difficult," he told The Associated Press through a video link screen on a second laptop attached to the robot. Background noise caused by pain or even a wandering mind has emerged as a major challenge in the research of so-called brain-computer interfaces since they first began to be tested on humans more than a decade ago, said Jose Millan, who led the Swiss team.

While the human brain is perfectly capable of performing several tasks at once, a paralyzed person would have to focus the entire time they are directing the device. "Sooner or later your attention will drop and this will degrade the signal," Millan said. To get around this problem, his team decided to program the computer that decodes the signal so that it works in a similar way to the brain's subconscious. Once a command such as 'walk forward' has been sent, the computer will execute it until it receives a command to stop or the robot encounters an obstacle. The robot itself is an advance on a previous project that let patients control an electric wheelchair. By using a robot complete with a camera and screen, users can extend their virtual presence to places that are arduous to reach with a wheelchair, such as an art gallery or a wedding abroad. Rajesh Rao, an associate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, who has tested similar systems with able-bodied subjects, said the Lausanne team's research appeared to mark an advance in the field. "Especially if the system can be used by the paraplegic person outside the laboratory," he said in an email. Millan said that although the device has already been tested at patients' homes, it isn't as easy to use as some commercially available gadgets that employ brain signals to control simple toys, such Mattel's popular MindFlex headset. - CBS News.

Meanwhile, a company in Sweden is hoping to make eye-tracking technology readily
available in the mass market, to use with computers, games and help with
other tasks, too.

If you heard a large boom just before 8am Sunday, you weren't alone. Dr. Bill Cooke with the Lead, NASA Meteroid Environments Office said the meteor eruption caused quite the commotion. Cooke said the meteor's energy was a whopping 3.8 kilotons of TNT.

That's about one fourth of the "little boy" bomb, which was dropped on Hiroshima during WWII. "This meteor was about the size of a minivan and had a mass somewhere around 70 metric tons. So if you can imagine a boulder about the size of a minivan with mass of 70 tons, you get a pretty good idea what the meteor was like." NASA believes the meteor exploded in the atmosphere over California, somewhere between Sacramento and Fresno. Cooke said the meteor was probably moving at about 33,000 miles per hour.

He said it probably came from the asteroid belt and exploded in the upper atmosphere and spread meteorites in eastern California, near the Nevada border. I asked Cooke what was the loud boom everyone heard? "When they get low in the atmosphere, the pressure in front of them builds up to the point where the meteor simply breaks apart and it does so violently it creates an explosion. The sound you heard was probably build up from that over pressure and the shock wave generated from that explosion." Cooke said you would think they are dangerous, but in all of recorded history, only one person has ever been hit a meteorite. - KTVN.

North Korea is armed with "powerful modern weapons" capable of defeating the United States, a top military chief in Pyongyang said Wednesday, a claim that matches the country's regular rhetoric but is questioned by experts.

The comments by Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho at a meeting marking the 80th anniversary of the army's founding came amid increased speculation abroad about the nation's missile arsenal and nuclear ambitions. Washington worries about the possibility that North Korea might develop a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile and a nuclear bomb small enough to use as a payload. But outside experts believe that is still a long way off. North Korea has enough plutonium for about four to eight "simple" bombs, according to estimates by scientist Siegfried Hecker of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, but it doesn't yet appear to have the ability to make bombs small enough to mount on a missile. The country's past long-range rocket tests — in 1998, 2006, 2009 and earlier this month — are believed to have ended in failure. Ri emphasized the importance of strengthening the military to defend North Korea against threats it sees from the United States and South Korea. He called his nation a nuclear and military power and praised new leader Kim Jong Un, believed to be in his late 20s, as a "military strategist" who has been giving the army guidance for years. "The Korean People's Army is armed with powerful modern weapons ... that
can defeat the (U.S.) imperialists at a single blow," he told party and
military officials, using familiar descriptions of the country's
rivals. - ABC.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is warning North Korea not to engage in any further provocation on the heels of the country's latest threats against South Korea.

Panetta, who is in Brazil, told reporters he had no indication of any specific actions being planned by North Korea. But he said he would "strongly urge" the North to avoid any acts that would create any greater instability in that part of the world. Amid new concerns that North Korea may launch a second missile test, the regime said Monday it would reduce the South Korean government to "ashes." An initial missile test on April 13 failed. - Associated Press.

A mysterious humming sound that has drawn hundreds of complaints in Windsor, Canada, for more than a year is emanating from Michigan, testing has determined.

The low-frequency, rumbling noise dubbed the Windsor hum is coming from the area of Zug Island, an industrial site, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported. But officials in River Rogue, Mich., where Zug Island is located, have said they don't have the money to find the precise source of the noise. "The government of Canada takes this issue seriously," Bob Dechert, a conservative member of Canadian Parliament, said in a news release. "It is important that we find a solution that works for the people of Windsor."

Jim Bradley, Ontario's environment minister, said the ministry has received nearly 500 complaints about the noise, and about 22,000 residents took part in a telephone forum in February about the hum. Bradley has sent letters to municipal, state and federal officials in the United States asking them to take action, while Dechert has met with representatives of the Great Lakes Commission, the Council of Great Lakes Industries, the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments and the Regional Office of the International Joint Commission to discuss the hum. Gary Gross said he's had his fill of the hum. "I was in bed, it was about 2:30 a.m. and I could just hear this pulsing noise," he told CBC News. "I decided to get up. It disturbed my sleep and I couldn't get back to sleep." - UPI.

"I didn't think I would get another
glimpse of the auroras this season because of the
increasing daylight," says photographer Ryan
Delos Reyes, "but this was a spectacular show." More auroras may be in the offing.
A minor CME is en route to Earth, due to arrive
on April 26th. NOAA forecasters estimate a 20% to
30% chance of geomagnetic storms. Aurora
alerts:text,
phone. - Space Weather.

More than 11,000 fish died in one of three fish kills to occur in the Dayton area since April 17, state wildlife officials said Wednesday.

The large amount of deaths occurred on Little Beaver Creek in Kettering, from Research Boulevard upcreek about three miles, said Joel Buddelmeyer, the acting law enforcement supervisor for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife District 5 office in Xenia. Smaller kills were on an unnamed tributary of the Great Miami River near Leston Avenue in Huber Heights that killed 330 fish. There was another fish kill in Vandalia, but it was not related to the R.D. Holder oil fire, Buddelmeyer said. The fire in Clark County caused fish kills in the vicinity of the blaze.

Spring fish kills have been linked to lawn chemicals sprayed on larger properties just before a rain storm, Buddelmeyer said. The chemicals quickly travel with water run-off into the area streams. "Until we develop a suspect, our investigators are trying to make contact with businesses in the areas," Buddelmeyer said. "It's hard telling." The dead included bass, catfish, suckers, darters, salamanders, frogs and crayfish. The kills were reported on April 17 and 21. Buddelmeyer said lawn companies should use caution when spraying and to postpone spraying when rain is in the forecast. - Dayton Daily News.

Lava flows from Puu Oo vent are
spreading over the coastal plain in Kalapana and over the weekend
entered the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. But the flows are still
about a half-mile from the ocean.

The flows active on the coastal plain for the last month and a half have
entered Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park in this Monday photo. These
flows were just 80 f eet within the Park boundary, and 0.6 miles from
the ocean.

The Hawaiian Volcano Observatory
released new lava photos taken Monday that show slow-moving breakouts
of pahoehoe lava, with the characteristic look of bunched up rope as it
cools. Other photos released in the
last month show how the lava has been spreading on the plain, rather
than moving directly to the south, toward the ocean.The plain is below the Pulama Pali and the Royal Gardens subdivision. The observatory also released video and thermal images showing the summit lava lake rising at Halemaumau Crater. A glow from the lava lake
illuminates the gas plume coming from the vent at night. The lava level
rises and falls as the volcano goes through inflation and deflation
cycles. The lake level is about 230 feet below the floor of Halemaumau
Crater. - Star Advertiser.